I'm currently working on a research for a paper I'm presenting at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies undergraduate conference in Tempe, AZ at the end of this month. You can check out the conference, and the Center here. The paper is essentially a translation and interpretation of an Old English poem called "Wulf and Eadwacer". It's an infamously difficult poem, and I have absolutely no idea why I find it so intriguing. For decades, people much smarter than I am have been trying to understand what, exactly, the poem is about; I'm not entirely sure why I think I'll be able to figure it out, but I'm trying.
In any case, my research on the poem has been difficult. The text I'd really love to get my hands on is a 10th century anthology of Old English poetry called the Exeter Book. It is housed at Exeter College, Oxford, and for obvious reasons is entirely out of my reach. However, there is another book, called Codex Exoniensis, which I believed would be slightly more accessible, and just as useful. Codex Exoniensis was written in 1842 by a man named Benjamin Thorpe, and is the first printed copy of the Exeter Book. It contains translations of each poem with notes on syntax and interpretation. It is, essentially, the earliest printed record of Anglo-Saxon scholarship. I'd very much like to read it.
Unfortunately, the U of A is not a hotspot for Anglo-Saxon research, and my library doesn't have a copy of the Codex. Fortunately, there's always Google Books. On this wonderful website, I found a scanned copy of every single page of the original printing, complete with citations and notes. It's the closest I'll get to the real thing (at least for a while), and it's been the most useful text I've found so far.
I'm sick, and I'm exhausted, and until I found this Thing To Be Happy About, I was feeling pretty down about my lowly position on the research totem pole. Things are looking up, thanks to Google Books.
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